Anyone who does say that is, I submit, either confused, or trying to confuse.
The position, whether you agree with it or not, is "Racism is prejudice plus power". Disenfranchised groups don't have the latter, but they damned well can — and often do — have at least as much of the former as the enfranchised.
EDIT: Or is somehow your position that the prejudices held by enfranchised and those held by the disenfranchised have no meaningful difference in their affects?
Power is relative. A minority manager has a certain power over those working beneath him/her, for example.
While there's a dearth of minorities in top positions in the economy... it's incorrect to take this generalization, and then say no minorities have any power.
There are minorities in positions of power, and they can use that to take racist actions.
Therefore, I disagree that minorities are incapable of racism (using the prejudice + power definition).
Which means the definition holds. Give someone power, they can be racist, and not merely prejudiced. It doesn't matter how much power objectively. It matters that they have relative power, over someone who is the object of their prejudice.
How is this so confusing?
> I disagree that minorities are incapable of racism...
Me too. Can you please clarify where you found a position to the contrary in my commentary?
In general, I think the most common interpretation of racism would be "prejudice w.r.t. race" rather than "prejudice plus power". I would suggest that perhaps oppression is a more appropriate word to use for "prejudice plus power".
Unfortunately, I wasn't appointed Plenipotentiary in Charge of How Controversial Terms Are Used in Academic Discourse, so my powers here are limited to explaining the position, as I understand it.
I think the most contentious point is that "prejudice without power" has become a socially acceptable phenomenon while a decade or two ago people were campaigning for no prejudice of any kind.
That's really insightful point! To my ear, condemning someone for engaging in "prejudice" has far less sting than condemning them for engaging in one of the "prejudicial isms" (like racism or sexism). The extra sting comes from the widespread and deep understanding that those isms refer to totally unacceptable behaviors.
I only see the "prejudice + power" definition of racism come up in defense of racially prejudiced comments. The effect is to (relatively) sanction and normalize forms of racial prejudice. Personally, I find that to be a totally unacceptable effect.
A motorcycle is a vehicle.
A bicycle is not a motorcycle. Why? Because a motorcycle has power.
Seriously, I don't know why the "prejudice + power" definitional distinction is so hard for well-meaning people to understand. It makes perfect sense.
For example, a white Appalachian coal miner and a black Ivy League professor have a power disparity based on income, education, and social class.
But the "prejudice + power" crowd will have you believe that the coal miner's membership in the elusive all-powerful "white people" monolith gives him more social cache´ (hence power) than the professor. That's because the professor's membership in the elusive "black people" monolith puts him near the top of the marginalized intersectional hierarchy.
Any rational person who isn't obsessed with the phenotypical categorization of individuals (aka a bigot) will reject this notion - recognizing the professor's freedom/power relative to the coal miner.
People are individuals (not groups) with complicated lives and experiences.
To reduce ALL "black people" to marginalized victims is the soft bigotry of low expectations. But worse, to elevate all "white people" above all "black people" is a vile and tacit view that all "white people" are the necessary saviors of all "black people". This kind of twisted illiberal thinking permanently infantilizes all "black people".
To insist that the "prejudice + power" argument is premised on bright-line "race == power" is to mischaracterize it to the point of being unrecognizable.
It's about relative power. If I'm black, and your boss, and have a prejudice against your race, I can be racist. If I'm black, have no meaningful kind of power over you, and have a prejudice against your race, I'm just prejudiced.
That's the position. This "ALL" lunacy is a multiple fallacies in one, and it remains a bitter disappointment to see a crowd of people who otherwise pride themselves aloud on being so smart, buy into it so unexaminedly.
It's almost as if the majority doesn't want us talking about it at all. That's how it's playing out in the culture.
Think about this when you attack terminology.
1. Which privileged majority?
> It's almost as if the majority doesn't want us talking about it at all. That's how it's playing out in the culture.
2. No one is censoring you. Talk all you like. Putting ideas and thoughts in the open is critical to arriving at common truth. But if these redefinitions and new language terms are to be pushed into the culture then expect inquiry, discussion, criticism, debate, resistance, dissent, and (when dialogue fails) mockery.
> Think about this when you attack terminology.
3. I don't accept that use of the terminology in question, in case that was unclear. Your redefinitions and new language are not sacrosanct to me. Here's how I see the three _P_ words:
* Prejudice, colloquially speaking, is to negatively judge people based on preconceived notions and stereotypes.
* A Privilege is a specific right or advantage gained through merit or inheritance.
* Power is the ability to exercise a freedom with low risk of sanction.
Remember, you're asserting your personal definitions over those that have developed through decades of academic discourse on the subject.
Why should we prefer your terms, again?
They are not his terms. His definition is the one that has existed for much longer than the ones the academics prefer.
People don't have issue with the academics' need to make distinctions. The issue is that if you need to make a distinction, you should coin a word for what you mean - not use a very well established term.
They're the generally accepted definitions.
The definitions you are presenting are therefore ideological at best.
2. I'm not being censored. Duh. Just because the right whines about being censored whenever someone disagrees with them doesn't mean I do.
3. Let's address the term "privilege" here again. I've defined privilege as "absence of discrimination". Discrimination is separate from prejudice - it's an expression of power (this is equivalent to the definition of "racism" that you reject).
Now you're going to have to think here, not just react. You agree that prejudice exists, right? Ok. So you agree that discrimination exists - that parties with power use their power to harm those who suffer their prejudice? Ok then. If you're arguing discrimination does not even exist, that's a different and unsolvable problem.
So what do you call an absence of discrimination? Because the absence of a thing is also a thing. We create words for that.
The generally accepted word for the absence of discrimination is "privilege". You reject this definition, disallowing the common English-language concept that words often have more than one meaning. So do you have a different word for the absence of discrimination? Do you have a way to express this in your pure vocabulary?
Didn't think so.
2. Whatever.
3. MW dictionary shows no such definition of privilege. Is it in wide use? Link?
Of course, I agree there's such a thing as "discrimination". When we make value judgements, we discriminate. You like blue better than red? That's discrimination. You like people with hazel eyes best? Discrimination. You like your family better than strangers? Yup - discrimination.
In the context of this thread. racial discrimination is to favor a race (positive discrimination) or devalue another race (negative discrimination).
And FWIW, I begrudgingly accept that the contemporary definition of racism is a superset that includes racial discrimination, racial prejudice, and racial antagonism.
I say begrudgingly because this wasn't the case 20-30 years ago. The words "racism" and "racist" were reserved for the most vile organizations or individuals that actively sought to discriminate/disenfranchise/injure people on the basis of their race or ethnicity. The word "prejudiced" was used to describe thoughtless or inadvertent discriminatory attitudes. The word "bigot" was reserved for people who hurled racial/ethnic epithets and found self-satisfaction from putting/keeping down people based on their race/ethnicity.
So you see - back then people used discrimination to sort these trespasses into a value hierarchy: the prejudiced person was annoying but okay, the bigot was an intolerable asshole, and the racist was vile and physically dangerous scum.
Relative power is relative, and its associated with a distribution curve. One can acknowledge that different groups has different averages and distribution curves, and that those indicate social issues, while still object to lazy stereotypic that ignores the relative property of power. So much political fighting and polarization could be avoided if more people would see power as relative property between individuals.
The systemic part is a profoundly under-recognized force multiplier for the individual's power.
The systemic bias is an term for the result of gender stereotyping. It is lazy thinking by people who ignore individual attributes and reduces people down to a single bit of information. Does this happen? Yes. It is a probabilistic aspect that can have beneficial or negative effect on a person. As a force multiplier, both negative and positive, it is a sign of fault in society.
I agree it is a often profoundly under-recognized, but I will add that it is also profoundly misrepresented. Gender stereotyping is harmful to individuality in a such strong way that only seeing the benefits for one gender is to ignore the harm that it does to both genders.
Would you mind clarifying the distinction between "differentially enfranchised groups" and "race == power" ?
One describes a tendency; the other asserts an identity relationship.
It doesn't map perfectly, but it's close enough for the bandwidth I have to keep contributing to this thread right now.
I don’t think the people arguing for this alternative definition quite agree with you, anyways. I think that most of them prefer it because it means they can say “black people cant be racist agains whites,” for whatever reason.
This is like saying that if someone were, e.g., operating from mistaken beliefs about the prevalence of some socially regressive attitude or other among technologists, it's appropriate for them to ask any random developer, "Why do developers think ____?"
Huh?
Not the subset of it I engage with — and that includes people who hold (graduate) degrees in things like "Gender Studies" or "Ethnic Studies", and such-like — which means we're playing some form of "dueling anecdata".
To that end, I'd invite you to speculate momentarily on how many people in this discussion have ever engaged in meaningful, substantive discourse with people from the "social justice crowd" (which, btw: ugh, dismissive name-calling, much?) about their positions, and aren't merely regurgitating their own narratives, of whatever other origin.
And with regards to "dismissive name-calling" - I wasn't aware that "social justice crowd" was a pejorative. If there's a better moniker that represents the broader set of ideas I'd be pleased to know and use it.
As for your claim that you're engaged in "other meaningful discourse" and that I'm "merely regurgitating my own narrative", I'd invite you to notice that your ad hominem attacks are not arguments.
I'm not asserting any specific person here is a member of either set — except myself, based solely and specifically on my own, direct experience. I'm also absolutely not asserting you're "regurgitating" anything.
Just, on the basis of the conversations I've had, and the independent reading I've done, there is no way some of the positions being fervently argued in this broader discussion are based on anything except internalizing some (usually agenda-serving) misapprehension of what "SJWs", or feminists, or whatever, are, want, and intend.
As for the term, itself, it's been seen as mostly pejorative for as long as I've been aware of it. How about, instead of a bucket you (the general "you") can dismiss people and their beliefs into, ("Oh, look. Another 'SJW'..."), we try something along the lines of, "Hmm. Someone who thinks differently from me. I wonder how..."
It's, in my "I've been online for more than 20 years now" opinion, a term that is vastly more often used to shut down discourse than it is to open it up.
I prefer to use "social justice advocates" - I used "crowd" here but there was no ill intent.
And if I didn't apologize earlier for making assumptions about your views, I'm apologizing right now. I'd rather learn what you truly think than insist a caricature upon you. It's the only way to have an honest conservation, I think.
I think "social justice advocate" is a reasonable term, though "social justice anything" is probably always going to risk evoking a reaction, and not a response; for example, I probably did with your use of "crowd", which might in turn have colored my reply.
I hope I'm offering you some food for thought, or at least another insight into a perspective that differs from yours.
There are people out there who hold considered, nuanced perspectives on these (and many other) topics. Our contemporary style of discourse makes it very difficult to be one of them. :(
The discourse does tend to quickly descend into defensiveness & assumptions of bad faith. For my part, I hope to do better the next time around. Cheers.
So yeah, speaking of dismissive.
Given how this new construction is used, my more cynical side wants to believe that what is gained is the ability of one side of the political aisle to spew any kind of hatred towards particular groups of people without criticism or consequence.
For a counterexample, look at the use of the word "privilege", a new definition introduced to the lexicon to explain one of the expressions of prejudice in society. (If you're already poising fingers over keyboard in angry rebuttal, stop and listen.) Privilege is conceptually very simple - it is the absence of discrimination. The absence of racism, or of sexism.
Yet the very term arouses righteous fury, to be even mentioned in the presence of many privileged people. Just watch the rebuttals this comment will draw for examples.
So to my original point, if you introduce new language to describe the prejudice + power concept, it will be vociferously attacked by those who do not face prejudice + power in their daily lives.
Likewise, if you more precisely define an existing word from this world - say, racism - it is also vociferously attacked, by the same people.
And attacking the very language being used to describe the problem is part of the problem.
Imagine you're gay, and you're hanging out with a new friend of your gender, who does not share your orientation. At what point is it appropriate for you to disclose your orientation to your friend? Too early, what if you're seen as coming onto them? Too late, what if you're seen as not trusting them? &c.
Not having to ask yourself that question is a form of "hetero privilege". It is a burden that, as a cis-het person, you will never face.
I no longer believe that. I think the people who are angry about the term "privilege" would be angry if we called it "bunnies".
It's not hard to understand, it's just a redefinition that was consciously created to justify claims that it was impossible for blacks to be racist, and which serves no good purpose. Yes, power dynamics are relevant to the impacts of racism; no, that doesn't make the effort to redefine racism in terms of them useful. Particularly because power isn't a binary trait, it's a multidimensional continuum, and prejudice is always accompanied by power, of some degree or scope.
And particularly, also, because he history of the redefinition is well-known and makes it divisive and redirects any discussion into a heated fight over semantics rather than substance, even if revisionists attempt to save the redefinition by trying to apply it in a more nuanced way.
It is easy to understand, but there is not consensus that the meaning should have been changed. Nor is there consensus on what "power" means.
Academics may have a good need for that distinction, but they made the mistake of overloading the word.
Attributing qualities and intentions to someone you do not know is not a constructive way of having a meaningful discussion.
Before you get angry, go read your sentence again, at how you used "normal person". What does that say about those of us who live in places with more social diversity? That we're not "normal"?
That's what I mean by suspicion: scrutiny, not dismissal. What, e.g., are the narratives in play, that enable someone to speak that casually, yet confidently, about a thing they're prima facie demonstrating a flawed understanding of?
I'm a "women are people too" feminist. I really have no interest in being your whipping boy regarding "man-hating bull-dykes" or whatever such bullshit. It's not accurate. It's not interesting. It's not even novel.
And yet, near-enough every time this stuff comes up, someone expects me to defend a position I neither hold, nor agree with.
Is it any wonder these kinds of stories get flagged off the front page?
Personally I'm a believer in equal rights regardless of gender, colour, beliefs or passion for collecting garden gnomes.
The term "feminism" implies that it pertains specifically to female rights. Perhaps "social egalitarian" is a more apt description for someone wanting equal rights for all, to clarify any difference.
Now, excuse me while I go and barricade myself into this hut in the woods before the pitchforks arrive.
My understanding is that "feminism" doesn't imply more rights for females, but rather highlights where they believe inequalities lie. Same reason people have adopted the phrase "Intersectional Feminist" so as to draw attention to where equality (even among women) is lacking - to those of color or less economic privilege.
Just like saying "Black Lives Matter" doesn't imply that African Americans lives matter more than others, you are using specific words to focus the application of a general idea (lives matter, equality is good, etc.) to a where you may think it is lacking.
The phrase "Black Lives Matter" is Ronseal. Which is to say that "it does what it says on the tin" - in the sense that the phrase exactly explains what you're campaigning for - equal consideration and rights for black lives.
The phrase "feminism" implies female rights, and (at least linguistically) nothing more. Now, it may be that feminists and non-feminists don't see the phrase as meaning that, which I understand to be your point, but I think that's where this becomes much more nuanced.
Anecdotally I have known self-described feminists who were very much about equal rights - but I have also encountered several (admittedly fewer) who were openly pro-female and anti-male.
Edit: removed anecdotal stories as they're just that: anecdotal.
I think there's a bigger discussion to be had here for all of us, and I really hope getting confronted with stories like this has the silver lining of bringing it about.
To take things out of the abstract, consider 'women in STEM'. In college girls do not enroll in STEM with anywhere near the rate boys do. And this receives immense media attention and coverage. However, there has been a sharp and increasing imbalance in girls:boys in college enrollment as a whole. In 1979 they became the majority. And the share of that majority has constantly increased. We're starting to push towards girls outnumbering boys in college by 2:1. And some education is, in general, leagues ahead of none. Yet this receives next to no media attention. And when it's mentioned the person is immediately pegged as some sort of a bigot or extremist as the connotation implied by labels such as men's rights activists.
And for what it's worth, I don't think there should be focus on this, but neither do I think there should be a focus on getting any gender/race/group/age or whatever into anything. I am an egalitarian and I think we should focus exclusively on providing equal opportunity so much as possible, but without pushing people into things. Norway is arguably the most gender-equal nation in this world, and one of their findings was when they directed girls towards fields girls did not regularly participate in, there was a mild but constant increase. Practically as soon as that push was relinquished, the numbers diminished to 'pre-push' times. On a smaller scale, like a good egalitarian I also pushed my wife into pursuing computer science over her previous interest in sociology during university. She excelled, as did I. Now years after that when we both have really our choice of whatever we want to do, she works with people -- and I work with code. I have no regrets bringing her into computer science, but it does make one wonder if it was truly the best decision. People are pliable enough that you can fit square pegs into round holes, but we also tend to be like sponges and after all that contorting that square peg contorted to fit into that round hole is eventually going to go back to being a square because that's what it wants to be.
[1] - https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_303.10.a...
That it is named "feminism" in this specific incarnation is an ephemeral and uninteresting detail. If this is genuinely your only sticking point, then call yourself a social egalitarian and stop demanding other folks conform to your private nomenclature. If, as it seems is more likely, this is a fig leaf to push back against what you see as the loss of privileges held by white men in society? Too bad: you're assuredly losing these, as they come at a high cost to everyone else.
"obviously the movement for intersectional social and economic equality would arise from some group other than rich white men?"
I'm not rich. I never said I was white (as it happens I am, but that's neither here nor there - why are you trying to start a racial argument?)
And why is your statement obviously correct as you put it?
"stop demanding other folks conform to your private nomenclature"
I didn't demand anything at all. Did you even read what I wrote? My point was the term is applied ambiguously, making the meaning unclear.
"this is a fig leaf to push back against what you see as the loss of privileges held by white men in society? Too bad: you're assuredly losing these, as they come at a high cost to everyone else."
This is a dramatic, well-crafted response.. to something that was never said in the first place.
None of this is even the most ridiculous part of your comment, which is surely the over-arching notion that any opinions you feel over your own privileges and how you've arrived at them are shared by everyone else on the internet who you assume is of the same skin colour and gender.
I believe very strongly in actual equality, as do most people describing themselves as feminists that I've spoken to, as I stated.
In short - please don't misconstrue my statements in an effort to make me look intolerant and bigotted. It debases a valid discussion, and I personally find it deeply offensive.
Now as I don't like to be confrontational about something so serious I would like to end by saying something kind; I'm proud of you that you used the words intersectional, ephemeral and nomenclature correctly in your post.
Oh?
> I'm not rich. I never said I was white (as it happens I am, but that's neither here nor there - why are you trying to start a racial argument?)
Well, I don't see me saying or implying you were, merely pointing out the incentives of the disenfranchised promote protest where the incumbents do not.
> I didn't demand anything at all. Did you even read what I wrote?
I did, actually! Let's quickly look at this telltale paragraph:
> > The term "feminism" implies that it pertains specifically to female rights. Perhaps "social egalitarian" is a more apt description for someone wanting equal rights for all, to clarify any difference.
So I'm left here with one of 2 conclusions:
1) Either this guy is parroting a common anti-feminist praxis.
2) This guy has no clue about the space and discourse, simply not realizing that in fact "intersectional feminism" is simply a historically faithful term for this "egalitarianism" he likes.
Personally, I don't believe you accidentally stumbled upon your argument. I think you made it in bad faith. That you immediately came back and demanded that I pretend to acknowledge your figment of neutral tone is confirmation, because what a rational person would do when confronted with a misunderstanding of magnitude 2 is try to work out how their communication went wrong. They would not (as an example) say, "Are you trying to start a racial argument?"
But on the off chance that this is all a massive misunderstanding: you're parroting an argument that is often used by people to derail and defuse the actual arguments presented by intersectional feminism by bikeshedding over the name. Please think on this, because in a modern 2018 internet when you do this (in a forum full of posts like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17759924) your voice is indistinguishable from theirs.
And if you disagree that "Feminism" captures your intent, please point to actual policy and not nitpicking about the name. Nitpicking about names is at best unhelpful.
Your latter assumption is correct, though - I'm not familiar with the discourse. "Intersectional feminism" is not a term I was familiar with, and having Googled it, it does appear to be what I was referring to. I say this cautiously, as Googling something is hardly going to give me a rounded understanding - but I intend to read up on it more.
"That you immediately came back and demanded that I pretend to acknowledge your figment of neutral tone is confirmation"
I really do not want to argue with someone over the internet about a topic like this, so it's the last time I'll quote. I just wanted to point something out to you.
For the second time, I've demanded nothing of you, and I don't understand why you keep using that word. You've again assumed malice when I really don't see that I've given you reason to.
I can't switch tabs right now to read the article you linked as I'm on a mobile and my phone will lose this comment, but I will read it as soon as I'm done posting here.
I don't agree or disagree that "feminism" captures my point. My point is that the term covers broad ideas that aren't always internally compatible, as you've pointed out.
"Intersectional feminism" does appear to cover my view on the topic (again, not familiar with the term before 20 minutes ago, so.. pinch of salt until I'm more up-to-speed on the topic).
Once I've read up, I'll be more aware of the terminology for the future, so thanks for the link.
Respectfully though, when you say my voice is indistinguishable from what I can only assume is going to be some fairly rough anti-women and/or LGBTQ speech, I'm going to be offended by it. I don't see where I've been irrational but maybe I'm just blind to it, I asked why race was being brought up as I genuinely don't see why skin colour needed to be mentioned at all.
UPDATE: I've read the comment you linked to. I've honestly nothing to say about it, or more to say to you on this topic. Good luck to you.
There is almost certainly a more accurate name. But changing the name would accomplish so little that sparring over the name feels like a distraction rather than progress.
What I'm saying is rather that the term itself encompasses a broader array of views than we're discussing here. I think to simplify it to "equal rights" isn't exactly congruent to what every adherent to the term holds as it's sole meaning.
B) In what way does "more rights" inhere in the term "feminism"?
I find The history of the different feminist factions to be very interesting and in particular I find the split between equality feminism and difference feminism to be one of the more significant event that illuminate much of the inconsistency of the movement that we see today. The older equality feminism view was that men and women are significant more alike than different and should thus be treated as identical androgynous humans, while difference feminism view men and women as different but deserving of equal power. The modern feminist factions are largely descendants of the difference feminism view so we get occasionally modern feminist that claim that women can not be sexist since men has more systemic power than women. It follows a kind of logic if one look at gender as uniform groups that wield power.
Still all those factions exist and so do the older equality feminism even if its just a minority today. The sad thing is when infighting occur, the common suggestion is that the other side is automatically far-right for not agreeing. I would suggest that this is why "the modern feminist movement" is starting to see more like a uniform set than different factions.
[citation needed]
When it comes to actually numbers I would like to think that most people would agree to view women and men as androgynous humans for all practical purposes unless it involves the sliver of domains where sex difference actually can be proven to have a large impact, and then being skeptical since most such finding that I have read get later reversed and attributed to culture and bias. I will assume you are one of those and thus give you an up vote.
I studied Sociology in the late 1980s and this definition of racism was part of the curriculum.
Isn't it entirely possible that a word can have different meanings in academic and non-academic circles?
Let's take something (presumably) less polarizing: the word "Literally". To some people, it means "an event that actually is/has happened" but it can also be used as a synonym to the word "figuratively". This can create conflict or misunderstanding when 2 people have different expected definitions of a word. Both are accepted by large populations, and if you use one in a way that has not been accepted by the person you're speaking to, you're not "wrong" you're just having a misunderstanding.
You can argue the validity of each definition, but there's no objective right or wrong here. If I say "Black people can't be racist towards white people because they don't have the institutional power to do that", and you respond "anyone can be racist" we're not having the same argument. You're just arguing semantics while I'm trying to make a point about the world.
I disagree. This article pretty well sums up my thoughts.
My point is, don't let people commit racist actions (I don't care about jokes) because they may have 'less power' due to their race.
By contrast, the traditional definition of "racism" that so many are vociferously defending here is used almost exclusively by white people. Think about that.
So people have self-serving definitions. Not a surprise.
If ISIS started publishing papers distorting the meaning of terrorism, peer-reviewed it among sympathizers, it wouldn't supersede the proper, scientific definition of the word
It almost seems like rather the rule than the exception.
Outside of disciplines that produce precise documents (law, engineering, academics), most words do not even have well-defined meanings. People associate words with fuzzy clouds of meaning: their own personal ones, not the definitions from a dictionary. When they speak they crudely grope among these clouds of meaning to fetch the words that best approximate what they are trying to say.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocabulary#Degree_of_knowledge
I try to stay away from it. Brings back horrible memories.
It's definitely not. What's the ratio of male to female CEOs in fortune 500 companies (it's around 20 to 1). What's the ratio of male to female members of congress? (~4 to 1). How many Presidents were women? Supreme Court Justices?
If feminists really have more power than just about anyone, why don't they put more women in positions of power?
If one is simply racist or not racist because of what collective their a member of, it negates individual agency and dehumanizes everyone.
This leaves us with some possibilities:
One, racism is an immoral act committed by an individual, and the individual's conduct is the principal determining factor.
Two, we can just blame it all on the patriarchy at which point racism as a concept is pointless.
Three, you could claim that only white people have moral agency, which even white nationalists would disavow.
Four, something between one and two, which is probably what the left prefers. And the moral of Jeong case is that it leads to a blatant double standard based on your political stance that is worse about undermining the notion of racism than #2.
Anti-feminists are covering their tracks by saying we live in a world that's already equally fair to women, which is obviously false. It happened with Adam, where believers distorted the meaning of "fall of man" to suit their narrative that it only applies to women separating men from their god. It's happened for ~2000 years, documented in the founding texts of the people now calling foul.
It's happening now, and it's not the last time. And just so you are aware, these narratives rely on the evisceration of science, logic, reason and well established definitions of words.
Speaking of founding texts, God and religion, classic feminism fought for emancipation of religiously enforced garbs, head coverings, female genital mutilation, etc. Contrast that to modern feminism - where women with freedom to dress as they please don Hijabs in the name of 'freedom', while the actually oppressed women fighting the Hijab [1] are conveniently ignored. That my friend, is the evisceration of science, logic, reason and well established definitions of words - where women in the west with all the freedom do the bidding of oppressive men who cite religious text's demeaning reasons to cover one's head and body
It really is a confusing time for normal people outside of the intelligentsia / twitter bubble.
Have... have you actually talked to a cross-section of feminists? Or do you just watch the kind of youtube videos about them where someone who failed out at the rest of their life now is a professional video-pauser?
If your exposure to actual feminist dialogues is quite sparse if you think Jeong hasn't faced substantial criticism. Her comments were pointed out as crass (if not actually structurally racist; because they're not for multiple reasons) and alienating.
What's more, Jeong has a long running scandal of helping Vice totally screw over a Chinese woman who is a performative maker named Naomi Wu. The reporter there wanted to run a piece about Reddit conspiracy theories w.r.t. (that Naomi is actually, by virtue of being a woman, obviously backed by a man who is the "real" talent). Naomi's addressed this a lot and had a written contract she pointed to as violated.
Sarah jumped in and helped deplatform Wu off of a variety of platforms and lead a charge to get Wu thrown off Patreon, because she wanted to defend her friend against the accusations of a woman who was angry for being dismissed as a sex symbol and nothing more.
So yah, there is a lot of feminist critique of Jeong that's valid. She's also kinda shitty to sex workers even as she says she thinks it should be fine. That's unsurprising, most of us have shitty upbringings and part of the idea behind public feminist dialogue is to help people recognize that these unconscious biases need intentional correction to be stamped out.
If you make jokes about how "I don't recall hearing about this plan at the last global patriarchy council" you can also make that same joke about "feminism." It's a broad movement with many adherents and to try and collapse it to a single priority set is ridiculous. The movement is not a monolith.
> It happened with Sarah Jeong, where the feminists distorted the English meaning of the word 'Racism'
Maybe you should time travel back to 2012 when boys-club Youtube skeptics were busy losing this fight and walk through the video breadcrumbs of how this collapsed. There are multiple senses of the word racism and some are more facile than others. What's more, Jeong was ironically mimicking the tweets of someone else making racist comments.
There is no doubt this is crass. It's discriminatory, even! But racist? If so, it's only in the sense that it's often misused as a synonym for "discriminatory" when in fact racism encompass a lot more than that.
> It's happening now with this case, and it's not the last time. And just so you are aware, these narratives rely on the evisceration of science, logic, reason and well established definitions of words
It's curious then, how if science and logic are the pole stars of the anti-feminist movement then how often actual scientists, statisticians and historians are considered to be "the enemy." Academia itself is often vilified by narratives your pushing, and the definitions you're decrying don't emerge from tumblr, but rather decades of scholarly inquiry. Many aspects of modern feminist theory have rich histories in literature that can't be easily brushed off as modern abominations.
Your original complaint about "redefining the word racism" is actually a complaint about how Academia (including your reviled humanities, but also many more disciplines) have recognized that there are systemic, evidenced-based measures of how environments alter the effect and scope of people.
The fact that you're upset about Jeong's words means that you actually believe in so-called "feminist bullshit" like micro-aggressions. To which I say: congrats to you for independently recognizing this is a thing, now ask yourself how that applies to others.
Say what you want about modern feminism, but the community certainly has integrity.
They absolutely do not. If you honestly believe that what Sarah Jeong tweeted was racism, then you have an incredibly sheltered life, and have never faced any kind of adversity.
It wasn't 'feminists' redefining anything, it's spelled 'semitic' and more importantly, you're just pivoting to completely unrelated culture war topics simply because women happen to be involved and you want to rant about them. That's not a great look.
He didn't rant about women, did he? he only mentioned feminism, or are you saying that only women are allowed to be feminist?
Anytime the modern feminism movement is faced with situations not to it's liking, there's an immediate, knee jerk, non-objective denial, and bull-shittery that casts aspersions on the truth, accuser, media, etc.
It happened with Sarah Jeong, where the feminists distorted the English meaning of the word 'Racism' to suit their narrative that it only applies to those in power. It happened when Linda Sarsour was openly anti-semetic and when her troupe faced metoo accusations.
It's happening now with this case, and it's not the last time. And just so you are aware, these narratives rely on the evisceration of science, logic, reason and well established definitions of words